Friday, January 31, 2003

Warning: This post was written to be provocative and may be offensive to some people.

--------------

As I have said previously, I favor abortion on demand not because of any bogus reasons concerning personal privacy or rights, but on utilitarian (Darwinian) grounds.

Which is to say, I refused to hide behind weasel words and concepts like "choice," when a fetus becomes a person, when life begins, and so forth. I feel no anxiety about helping women who choose to abort feel good about that choice by lying to them, telling them they are just ridding themselves of a lump of tissue. I think that we ought to be clear about the fact that when we perform an abortion we kill a child because the imperative to respect human life, whatever little is left of that imperative in our society, demands inclusiveness in the concept of "child", not exclusiveness or dismissal, if there is any doubt. The reality of it is that we have decided for a number of reasons that abortion is good and acceptable regardless of any other moral considerations.

What I mean by abortion being good in a utilitarian sense is that the people who abort their children purely for reasons of birth control tend to be those who ought not procreate, and this works for the good of society. That is, I mean that those whose personality and temperment is to kill their own children are those who are best eliminated from the gene pool. I don't mean by this that these people are of undesireable character because they choose to abort, but that they are of undesireable personality in general, and that personality leads to behaviors such as casual abortions and problems and difficulties in other spheres of life for others that we can all do without. In other words, it is no accident that the women who have had multiple abortions tend to be the selfish, self centered, sociopathic, blame shifting, narcissistic trouble makers amoung us. And, for that matter, so are the men who keep getting them pregnant.

Of course, this doesn't exclude the possiblity that there are a number of women who are perfectly nice, with good character, who need an abortion from time to time, it only means that the evolutionary pressure caused by abortion on demand weighs more on people with undesireable personality.

By contrast, Margaret Sanger, pioneer of the "Family Planning" movement, was quite frank in feeling that it was people of non-white races, the infirm, or people with subnormal intelligence that should be subjected to efforts to reduce fertility and the like. In her book, "Pivot of Civilization," involuntary birth control is clearly implied. However, with the revelations about Nazi atrocities during WWII, she quickly backpedaled and insisted that she only wanted people to have access to strictly voluntary birth control measures all along. She apparently reasoned that people in difficult circumstances caused by their own problems, such as being a member of a disadvantaged race, would choose to limit their fertility. As it turns out, she was right. Of course, this could be either good or bad, depending on your perspective.

Conyers, Rangel, Sharpton, et al. continue to miss the real story of racial disparity in casualty rates: the disproportionate numbers of black casualties in the war on the unborn. While Sharpton and the other Democratic presidential hopefuls celebrated the 30th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade at NARAL's gala, the black community continued to be decimated by abortion rates that are nearly three times the rate of whites.